Skills shouldn’t be the only lens for HR: GE HealthCare’s CPO calls on HR leaders to evolve

Has HR’s skills-based revolution outpaced its own infrastructure?

For several years, skills have taken center stage in HR’s mission of finding and retaining top talent. 

On paper, focusing on what people can actually do makes perfect sense – leading organizations to build skills taxonomies, create internal talent marketplaces, and rethink how work is structured.

But as Adam Holton, Chief People Officer at GE HealthCare and UNLEASH American 2026 speaker, highlights, skills alone aren’t enough. Businesses must understand how to map, validate, and nurture them correctly. If they fail to do so, Holton shares that leaders may be at risk of having “just the facade of a skills-based approach.” 

In this exclusive conversation, UNLEASH sits down with Holton to explore why skills are still a crucial aspect of talent strategy – but they shouldn’t be the only lens through which organizations evaluate people.

Viewing the skills-first approach from a different perspective

Part of Holton’s stance on skills stems from the broad and sometimes ambiguous meaning of a “skills-based approach”. 

For some, it’s a way of identifying the capabilities needed to execute work, whereas for others, it’s about breaking jobs into smaller tasks and rethinking how work is organized, moving away from traditional job-based structures.

Although Holton believes that this makes sense “philosophically”, he highlights that realistically speaking, it creates “a lot of holes” which could be a particular problem “in the world of AI”. 

Holton raises three key concerns – the first is skills validation. 

“How do you validate whether a person has a skill or not?,” Holton asks. “There are some skills that lend themselves toward that, but most taxonomies and skills rely on self-validation. 

“Guess who’s really terrible at validating their own skills? If it’s tied to an incentive, I think every human in the world will lie about where they’re at. It’s human nature.”

Secondly, many organizations are not willing to make the significant shifts required around job architecture.

“If jobs still control how you do compensation and promotion, you don’t really have a skills-led approach,” he explains.

“A lot of companies want to put a taxonomy in place, but the architecture and the support around it is all still job-based. To me, that’s just the facade of a skills-first approach.”

Holton’s third and final concern lies with regulated industries. 

Regulated industries – such as the category GE HealthCare falls into – have certification requirements and audit pieces that “don’t lend themselves to a true skills-based approach versus job-based”. 

“When you look to the future in an AI-enabled world, the big issue is around evolution. In traditional organizations today, skills evolve and the need for them evolves over years,” Holton adds.

“So it gives you, if you’re able to figure out the architecture, the opportunity to really invest what it takes to get after that.

“In an AI world, skills are going to be commoditized in weeks.”

Yet these factors unearth a wider problem for Holton: how organizations are developing their leaders.

Many companies rely heavily on competency models and capability frameworks, but these approaches are often failing to keep pace with evolving skill requirements.

One of the biggest mistakes, from Holton’s perspective, is not closing the gap between “this is my job” and “this is learning”. 

“If you go back to yesteryear, we would have learning pathways that would be: do your job, and then we’re going to pull you out of your job, we’re going to physically put you somewhere, and you’re going to learn,” Holton explains.

 “While we’ve made some advances over the years on that, that still pretty much holds even in virtual learning and others.

Your job should be to learn, and learning should make you better on the job. Putting those together side-by-side is something that I think we still fool ourselves into thinking we’re a lot better at than we actually are.” 

Additionally, Holton spotlights how knowledge and skill building can often be confused. For example, in leadership development, a primary goal is to build leadership skills – yet “most of the learning” that takes place is knowledge-oriented. 

“It’s awareness,” he adds. “It’s not actual skill building. We convince ourselves it’s skill building because it’s convenient to say, but it really isn’t.”

With this in mind, Holton adds that HR leaders can spend a lot of time “with the lecture, the awareness, or the knowledge” – but that doesn’t mean it’s practiced enough.

To expand on this point, he explains that, as a former basketball coach for eight year olds, he was conscious that “it didn’t really matter what” he said to them; they needed to do.

“Me explaining for 30 minutes how to take a perfect shot meant nothing to them and added zero value,” he jokes. “But me having them for 30 minutes – every kid with the ball in their hand, working on it, taking a shot and starting to develop that muscle memory, giving them some cues – that’s where actual effectiveness happened.” 

To tie all of these factors together, Holton summarizes that “not enough of our leadership skill building is experiential”.

Although there’s some “good things” that can create experiential settings, HR leaders have got to do “much better” at making leadership development truly experiential – “because that’s where you learn the most”. 

Learning agility vs technical skills

As a part of today’s skills-based approach, Holton recognizes that “too many” organizations are focused on being comprehensive – rather than being effective. This is known as cognitive saturation. 

For example, by identifying all the required skills, HR leaders are overlooking that “every single skill” added to the matrix “reduces our opportunity and chances” to be effective in developing those within the organization. 

In a world where skills requirements are changing at a rapid rate, Holton suggests that rather than depending on as many competencies as possible, a focus should be placed on skills agility and decision quality. 

For me, learning agility is how long it takes a leader to update their behavior when reality contradicts their assumptions?” Holton explains.

“Sometimes, people think of learning agility as just being open-minded – there’s a component of that, but that’s not what it is.”

Instead, Holton highlights five key aspects of learning agility: 

1. How quickly you can separate signal from noise in new situations. 
2. How you create hypothesis-driven actions – meaning, decisions are treated as experiments. 
3. Disconfirming evidence seeking – how do individuals actively look for data that challenges your own view? 
4. Changing behavior when what is learned is different to what was thought. 
5. Decompressing learning cycles.

As a result, Holton believes that the shift towards developing learning agility and decision quality is going to be “way more important” than the technical skills traditionally taught.

He uses GE HealthCare as a direct example of this, stating the business is currently “transforming” its “HR organization to be an AI-enabled function”. 

Holton explains that, for GE HealthCare, understanding technical AI capabilities and tools has not been the most important factor. Instead, the emphasis has been on mindset – how to challenge former assumptions, drive curiosity, and embrace the idea of “unlearning” what has been known up to this point. 

“Most people don’t know how to experiment to see if something works,” he notes. “We call things ‘best practices’ often because they’re only practices we know.

“It should, in fact, be: ‘We tried five different things, we did a true design of experiments, and arrived at this as the best outcome’.

“I think that learning will continue to evolve, and leadership development will continue to evolve towards that.”

As a result, Holton has one, clear-cut message to share with HR leaders. 

He says: “I’ll make it a one-word message: Evolve.”

Want to hear more from GE HealthCare’s CPO Adam Holton?

Holton will be taking center stage at UNLEASH America 2026 to take an even deeper dive into this topic.

I’m really looking forward to the keynotes; they look really interesting. I think a lot of people know Ethan Mollick – to me, he is the Michael Jordan of the intersection of AI and work. 

“Every time I see him, I’m just starstruck. He’s such an incredible thought leader in his space.” 

He is also looking forward to seeing how the space has changed from UNLEASH America 2025. 

“One of the things I really love about UNLEASH is the variety of vendors that are there and the capabilities. It is my go-to to really see in one fell swoop what has changed and how we’re evolving in that space. 

“And then I also look forward to UNLEASH just to see friends, to see people who I care about, who share our passion around this space and what we do. As I’ve gone each year, that feeling grows more and more.”

It’s not too late to grab a pass to join us in Las Vegas, March 17 to 19, for UNLEASH America 2026.